Zapier's Remote Work AMA - How to Transition to Remote Work in a Hurry

Good morning, happy Friday everyone. Thanks for joining in with us. We've got Michael from Trello, Natalie from Wild Bits, Kieran from HubSpot, Sarah from Meet Edgar here today. These folks all have a lot of experience working remotely and in different types of environments. Some of these folks have been in large companies, some in small companies. Some have been doing a hybrid model, some a complete remote model. Some are bootstrap, some venture funded, some are public companies. So we've got a lot of range of experience here that should make it easy to have an interesting conversation and help you get a feel for how you might approach it in your environment, because odds are, you know, not a business sort of this day. And so we're gonna have a lot of different takes on this stuff. First sort of thing: we got about 500 questions in on the Wufoo form that I set up. So a lot of questions. I went through and organized them all, condensed them down to a few different themes. So we're gonna hit on the top themes, the stuff that seemed to be most top of mind for everyone. We also have the Q&A open for Zoom—at least I believe, all you do, who knows, I might have got that. So if it is working, go ahead and try and use the Q&A, and I think you can submit down both questions, and we'll try to get to those if we have some time at the end. And now I think that covers it. So let's go right into the meat of this stuff. First question I want to dig into, though, is I want to talk a little bit about how to do the transition. And so I think, Kieran, I want to ask you first, because I know we talked a few years ago: HubSpot was heavily an office-oriented culture, and it's known for its fun office culture, its good vibes. But your team was one of the first—maybe the first, I'm not sure—to start doing remote work. Can you talk a little bit about how you made that transition from a purely office culture in your team's to one that is a remote-first environment?

Yeah, at the start, we started to become more remote just by chance. There was a role at HubSpot that I was asked to do; I couldn't move to Boston to do it, and so they were kind enough to allow me to do it from Dublin. My plans there were then to hire all of my team in Dublin. And as the team grew, it just ended up that most people were based in the States and were remote to me. So we kind of started to figure out remote back in 2016 and 2017. And figuring out remote was hard. My first call with my team was on GoToWebinar—or, I go to meet, and I think I couldn't even see anyone. I was being introduced to them as, 'Here's your new manager.' Like, 'Hey guys, can't see anyone, don't know any of you, but whatever.' My first 13 or 14 direct reports were all based in the States, so it was really difficult. There are some things that we started to do that I think helped, and they're small tips. One thing we did pretty early—we grew to about 20-25 people—we had this thing called 'Remote Week.' We allowed people to experience remote without having to commit to it, because the reality is, for some personalities it's not that hard of a transition; for other people it is a very difficult transition. People like to be around people in the office, and they could get to experience remote without having to commit to doing it straight away. I think that was really important for us because it helped people to be more empathetic to people who were remote and not in the office, in terms of being able to communicate and how hard it is to do your work when everyone is in an office environment and you're the only person who's remote on that team. Over time, what we noticed was that more and more people became not only comfortable working with people who were remote and more empathetic, but they actually started to like it and enjoy themselves because they had a transition that wasn't over the course of 24 hours. It helped them to transition in a way where they could do it at their own pace and start to find that there were actual real benefits to it. So when we fast forward to today, out of my 62 to 70 or so marketers that I manage, I would say half of them are fully remote from their homes, other people are in office but spend a lot of their time working remotely, and then most of the people are remote to me. I think about it like presenting: people ask me how to get better at presenting, and I always think it's practice. There's no shortcuts. You go through a period when you're not a very good presenter, then you go to a period where you're a good presenter but you're not very good at being a storyteller, and then you get progressively better. That's how we evolved in remote. We were not very good at being a remote team to begin with, but we stayed with it because we believe it's a better option for people who want to live that kind of lifestyle and have a great life around their work. We took those pain points and tried to learn from them and create a better experience for everyone involved.

I love it, love it. Now Natalie, you all, on the Wild Bits blog, you talked a little bit about this where at the end of last year you downsized your office and then made the intentional decision to have less space in Philly. Can you talk a little bit about why you all made that decision, what you noticed in your own business that allowed you to commit more to the remote setup?

Sure. So we've been remote since day one. At the very first—we turned 20 in October—so the journey has always been remote. We ended up with a Philly office when we started to have a bunch of Philly folks. We had folks that were living in Philly too, and they said, 'Well, let's all work together.' So we had this kind of transition to hybrid, where people wanted to be able to come into the office and see each other. Hybrid is a challenging kind of... it's a lot of work to make sure that you are remote first. So we went through this whole transition early on where we realized how less productive we were when we were in the office from having been fully remote, and also that we were making decisions together in that office that weren't permeating for the whole company, and that became really obviously challenging. So in 2012-13, I guess, we went fully remote first, but we still had a physical space. When we moved out of this big 10,000 square feet, there were only like eight people in Philly, which was ridiculous. But we had private dedicated offices for everybody because everything was around this remote-first culture of being very productive and having your own focus space. We downgraded that to a small, little—what we call a 'while'—co-working space, because what we realized was people really did prefer to work from home and just needed every once in a while a place to come in to have a change of scenery. So we are now in a co-working space where they've built us out a private space; we have dedicated offices, five private offices. So every once in a while people come in and do the work they do here, but they still feel like they're in their own little cube, but they have the energy around them. What had happened with the old office was: in 10,000 square feet, people would come in and if nobody was there, it was actually depressing. You'd show up and be like, 'I don't know if anybody's gonna be here, and why do we have all this space, and I'm all alone, and what am I doing for lunch?' It just was a waste of money and energy. The co-working space has been really cool because even if you come in and you're alone, you have the energy of other people around you, other companies, other teams, people freelancing outside, go to the coffee and there's somebody there. So it's created a nice hub. But we really just call this the co-working space, and like, I come in and there's nobody here.

Now Michael, you all at Trello have a very remote-friendly sort of remote-first environment. You joined Atlassian a few years ago, which is mostly offices—now granted, a lot of offices across the world. How does that change the dynamic for remote at Trello, and have you found that Atlassian has become more remote friendly, and how have they made some of that transition?

Yeah, I mean, well, today, almost the entire company's remote right now, you know. But when we were working, we have a hybrid model as well. We've sort of been mostly half remote, half not remote. In New York City, we had kind of a headquarters, and actually over time, we just were hiring and it kind of crept up—the remote piece went up to almost 70 or 80 percent for the Trello team. When we joined Atlassian, there were actually more remote workers at Atlassian—a much bigger company—than there were at Trello, but they were spread out throughout the organization. I think that was one of the learnings: part of being successful at working remotely is that you have to adopt the remote-first mentality. If you're the random person on the team that's in the office, you feel it. So we learned that once you get to 50%, 60% remote, you have to adopt the way that you're working; your office becomes Slack and Zoom, and where you're managing with Confluence or something like that. That shift was... I'd be in meetings with people in Sydney or San Francisco, and I'd be in a conference room with other people in the meeting, and I would dial into Zoom so that my face was even with everyone else's. You don't end up with one face and then all the people in the conference room around the table. They were like, 'Why are you doing that? We already have a camera on the entire room.' And I'm like, 'I just want to put us all on the same level playing field.' That's really cool. So people started to learn, 'Okay, I get it. I understand that we can put everyone on the same footing.' So there's been a lot of learnings both from Trello to Atlassian. And even now, when most of our US offices and some of the non-US offices are work-from-home with closed offices, I created a channel in Slack—I was like, 'Go to pound remote'—and anyone that's struggling with this, we'll try to give you tips. And of course, that channel just started filling up with stuff.

So the most popular question we got by far coming into this event was: How do we have fun? How do we stay engaged? How do we build morale? How do we prevent loneliness, isolation? For a lot of us, the office can be a fun place, a place where we make friends, feel like we have a sense of community, a sense of purpose, a sense of mission. I want to hear from all of you on this, but Sarah, you know, Edgar has been remote I think from the get-go. Can you talk a little bit about how you all do some of that?

Sure. Um, yeah, we've been remote since the very beginning, so we kind of built things out as we added people one at a time and saw where something was lacking and where we might need to put some additional support in place. I think if you look at the way your office functions in a non-remote setting, you have to gauge things from how things actually happen. So if your social atmosphere is generally really reliant on spontaneity and people bumping into each other, you kind of have to create that a little bit for your team members, which on the face of it sounds like it doesn't sound very fun. But for us, it's more about prompting those conversations to happen. So we have general water cooler Slack conversation, but we'll put in a question of the day so that people, if they need a break from their work, can just pop in and answer those questions. It's not totally necessary to do that constantly; you can have that channel on mute and just pop in when you want to take a break. We also try different kinds of activities that maybe you haven't thought of before. We like to do movie days every once in a while; we'll stream a movie and have everybody watch it at the same time. You can be doing something on the side if you'd like, but there's a movie going and some chat. So you have to get a little bit creative with what you normally do in an office environment and try to find the remote way to not necessarily recreate the exact same activity but recreate the environment that caused it. We try to get different ideas from folks on the team about what they'd like to see or what they miss or something that happened in a previous work environment that they really enjoyed. We've come up with things like synchronous food deliveries and things like that to happen. Honestly, if you get open-minded about it and really view the social aspect of the work as part of work itself, in a normal office environment these kinds of activities are not seen as the best way to spend 45 minutes of your day, but when you're working remote 100 percent, it becomes something that's really important to do. The more time you can spend having a silly conversation in Slack, the easier it is when you get on a video call for the first time with folks on your team and have to start diving into work right away. It helps to lubricate the actual work part as well.

Yeah, what about the rest of you all? How are you all trying to create a fun, engaged culture, helping people avoid loneliness and isolation so that they actually feel like they're part of something?

One of the things we did is similar to these other ideas. The second service point—it feels kind of clunky to try to create a space for serendipitous conversation, but it can be really helpful. We had these things called 'Mr. Rogers' where once your team gets big enough, people are working in the day-to-day and don't have any interaction with other people in the company, don't even know who those people are. In a normal office space, you might run into them doing sits across from lunch, so you have to create a moment for, like, an engineer to meet a salesperson or something like that. We were scheduling them to have little Zoom meetings, and we let people schedule them—but that little bit of friction meant it was hard to do. And we realized: we do these town halls once a month, get everyone into the Zoom, and Zoom's breakout feature will just send random people to rooms. You can set how many people per room and it just sends random people. That was a really great way of extending the town hall because everyone was already there, we're not working. So it's like, 15-20 minutes, let's just break out into rooms and introduce yourself, talk about whatever, not work-related. It's not as serendipitous as being in person, but we created those moments for people to try to get to know each other.

Yeah, I think that's the important thing. When people talk about trying to recreate the office environment, you can kind of break it into two parts: there are certain people who just crave that in-person contact, and then a lot of what people are asking for is how do I get to know my team outside of work, which is harder when you're remote because you can't recreate in-person contact. If you miss that, there's little you can do to recreate that. What you can do is recreate moments where you can get to know your team members better—their interests, their hobbies. So a lot of the things we've talked about is how to actually spend time with people in a remote environment and discuss things and engage in a way that's not focused on your work. All of the things that were mentioned are basically the things we try to do. The other thing I've been trying to figure out is how to do online team events, like fun events. We did an online group quiz using Zoom and its breakout features: putting people into breakout rooms to confer about questions, coming back. I had to organize that; it was so painful. I've been looking for a company that can actually organize team events for distributed teams. If people want someone to set up that company and come back to me, that would be pretty cool. The other thing we try to tell people managers who manage remote workers is: spend the first five minutes of your meeting just asking questions about that person's life. Because everything in remote is on schedule time, and it always feels like it's about work because that's just the nature of when you're online; you're going to generally talk about work more often than not because you don't have those organic conversations. So you're trying to create those moments where you talk about other things. We have similar things around Slack: Game of Thrones was one of our most popular Slack channels. And to all of the other speakers, they're very similar things in terms of trying to recreate those moments.

Yeah, we had a similar thing. We used to talk about Game of Thrones. We actually have a naming convention for Slack that helps: all of our off-topic channels are prefixed with 'fun,' so that is a visual signal to the person coming into the channel that, hey, this is actually an off-topic channel. You see things like gardening, parenthood, homeownership—which is arguably not fun—cats and dogs, and other types of things where people can congregate around shared interests. It's not like people show up in these rooms and chat all day long, but it's a place where they can show off a picture of the new puppy they got, and everyone goes, 'Ah, that's cute,' and they have a good conversation around it. That helps people feel a little bit engaged. We do the same thing that Michael was talking about—we don't call them Mr. Rogers, we call them donut chats. There's a bot called Donut that can auto-schedule these for you. We also have city channels—anything prefixed with 'city' is where people are located, so those people will often organize a time to go to a coffee shop or whatnot to get to know each other a little bit more. Obviously can't do that right now, but it's good to have. So those types of things go a long way.

The other thing that's big on everyone's minds, I think, is productivity. Productivity is something everyone is sort of—how does this work in a remote environment? I think managers are concerned: 'Hey, how do I know that it's happening? How do I know that work is getting done if I can't see folks? How do I know that it's working?' On the employee side, a lot of folks are concerned: 'How does my boss know that I'm getting stuff done? I want to prove it to them.' In fact, you see questions like, 'I feel like I'm working overtime a lot just to prove to my boss that I'm being productive.' So there's some unintentional, I think not good, behavior that comes out of this miscommunication around what's getting done. So how do you all think about productivity? I think perhaps we can answer this in two different ways: one is, in a normal environment, how are you thinking about productivity? And then two might be, how are you thinking about it today given that everyone's day-to-day is being quite disrupted by current events?

I think the second question is the most interesting because I think the answer is: it's hard to be productive right now. My kids are out of school at home. People aren't used to this new way of working, so they're adjusting to the tools, the style, the process. So people just have to understand that this is going to be an adjustment. While I would hope it was just a week or two, I think there has to be a lot of trust right now and understanding, trying to come up with new routines and things like that in the current situation. But to your other point, around normally when people have those routines and things, the quicker that you can adjust to them and get them set up—being open, transparent, all that kind of stuff—that's what all the tools that we use are for: Google Docs, Confluence, Trello, Slack, Zoom. These are all about moving your office from the physical world to the virtual world. All the tools that have been developed over the last ten years make that super easy. So I think actually the concern that people aren't as productive is almost backwards, because your productivity can be measured by the output instead of the butts in seats. You walk into the office and see everyone's here at 6 AM—but what are they doing? Now, the documents, the assets, the creation of the work is happening in those tools, and you can aggregate that information in front of the people who want to see it. When you're talking in Slack, you're having that conversation, so many people can be privy to it, which is great. It's easier, these channels are mostly open. I think one of the pitfalls is that people move to Slack and start using it but treat it like email, making lots of DMs and private channels. Nope, you gotta switch to be more transparent, because that's the blocker and the friction. That's the advantage of working remotely: you can disseminate this information. One caveat I would say is that if you start to feel like there's a miscommunication happening or some kind of conflict in chat, and you're going back and forth like a flame war, we taught ourselves to escalate to Zoom. Chat is not great for that because now you're having an argument for the entire office. People get kind of... you're missing all the emotional cues, you lose the trust that you built in the Mr. Rogers or the donut chats. You have to be careful: if this is going sideways, let's go to Zoom, then you go back to the room and say, 'We worked it out,' or whatever.

I think too, if we were to switch now, almost to me, remote work only works if you build trust. That's like the key. The question of productivity, 'How does my boss know I'm working?' and 'How do I know my employee is working?'—that's all a trust factor. What we learn on teams that have been remote for a long time is you build that trust, and the faster you get to it, at that point we don't need to know that your butt is in the seat. I don't care how long you work at all. I only care that we make an agreement, this is the promise we're making to each other, and if we deliver on that promise, awesome. In the current situation, these teams that have not built that trust virtually—because they see this person show up at 6 AM and stay till 6 PM, and that must mean they're working—the fastest way to build that trust is to really create really clear goals and shorten them as much as you can, so that you're delivering and getting feedback in a much shorter loop. On our team, I would never say, 'Let's check in daily.' That's just not the way our culture is; we want to give people as much quiet time, especially on a distributed team on different time zones. But today, I would say, 'Let's create small accomplishments that we all agree to that we can deliver on,' so the manager can see that you're delivering on them, and the employee has communicated clearly enough that you know they're working on it. That can slowly transition to longer-term goals. I could totally see the argument for daily stand-ups, or for shorter docs—a single pager that is the goal for the week or the month and this is what your contribution is, and everybody is in agreement with it. That reduces the confusion around, 'Is this what I should be working on? Is this what they're expecting from me? How often should I communicate?' I think it's just a different time, and I would not normally suggest this to my team—if they're listening, they're like, 'What are you crazy?'—but we just have to build that remote trust. Managers sitting there now saying, 'I don't know what they're doing,' right? Because we're not watching you. I think there's an opportunity here to just take things down to much more smaller deliverables.

I was gonna say, for us, the other half of that is just being really clear as a manager with what you're expecting. I genuinely think the vast majority of people want to do a good job at their job. If they don't know what that looks like, or they don't know what you think their day—what you're expecting their day to be like—if they don't know your expectations, then they're gonna have a really hard time meeting them. So for us, it's just trying to keep everything that's basically stating the absolute obvious. If you have this expectation that something is going to happen by Thursday, just be really clear about that. And make it really clear as well from your team that, hey, the second it seems like this might not happen, let's have a conversation about it. That's fine. But this is just what I was thinking when I'm putting it out there. So it's really hard—trust has to go both ways. You want to trust what your team is doing, but your team also needs to know that you're not going to change the goalposts on them somewhere where they can't see that happening. I think that is also really supported by just being very transparent. All of our meeting notes, we try to take a record of what happened in meetings and then, like Michael was saying, bring them back to Slack to say, 'Here's what happened, here's what was decided.'

Yeah, you mentioned earlier about employees reaching out saying, 'How do I prove to my manager I'm doing good work?' I feel like it's the same way. It's a good opportunity for employees to change how they think: 'How do I know at the end of the week that I made good productive progress? What is the evidence, and how can I share that with my team?' The habit of stepping away and reflecting on the work you did, whether remote or not, makes you more focused on the end goal. It provides a good self-check to see if you got off track. Overall, in a workplace, that's just going to be a positive thing to hit your goals faster.

One comment: Michael's doing something interesting in the chat, dropping links so attendees can chat as well. Inside the webinar, this happens like in our Zoom all-hands—there's a side chat where people supplement the main conversation with links and resources. Many attendees have expertise in these areas, so don't be shy—chime in, share a link, add your own anecdotes. You all have as much to contribute as we do. That's one cool thing about these tools: you can have a main chat and a side chat. I noticed the default might be 'panelists only,' so attendees need to change the dropdown to 'all panelists and attendees' to be seen. There you go.

Awesome. Let's shift to a new topic. Natalie called out that we have some large companies in attendance—I even saw someone from government. Many of us have been forced into this situation without much planning, without the technology or tools set up, without any planning. Put yourself in those shoes: what technology do people need? What's the MVP, the minimum viable setup for a home office? How are you coping with school closures, with other folks being in your working and living environment? How are you thinking about that in your own companies? Surely you all have parents working for you who now have kids at home, spouses stealing their workspace. Everything's disrupted. How do you set yourself up to get a good foundation so if this lasts, we can get some normalcy?

Yeah, for us, it hasn't been super impactful to our day-to-day until kids started staying home from school and regular childcare wasn't available. Usually, we have clear working hours, but now we're being really flexible with schedules and patient with folks who unexpectedly have to step away from their desk. We have to understand that things are outside the normal routine, and expectations can't be the same. Even without kids, it's a noisy time out there. We have to give space for people to emotionally deal with their own stuff.

I think sometimes people find solace in productive work, but sometimes they can't. We have to remember that work is a big part of life but not anyone's entire life. Try to be the one thing in their life that's not a huge problem right now. I've been thinking about productivity—maybe we should redefine it for a bit. These are not normal times. Even at a company like ours, which is always remote, I sent an email this morning saying it should be business as usual, but I couldn't get anything done yesterday. The cognitive load is high. For bigger companies, maybe leadership should gather and say, 'What's really important? Can we rally folks around each other?' If a single parent can only get two hours on a big project, maybe someone else can jump in. We don't need to do everything at once. Create a culture of supporting each other and the business to be what it needs to be right now, not what it was two weeks ago.

Another popular question: whiteboarding and brainstorming. How do you do it? Do you do it at all? What do you do instead to replicate that in-office riffing on an idea?

I don't really do whiteboarding in the traditional sense. We've gotten creative with brainstorming exercises. We like to give people a chance to generate ideas alone or in smaller groups, then share with the larger group. For example, when we were naming our company, we all worked in secret on our plans, then passed them around for others to build on. We've figured out ways to build our method for brainstorming without a whiteboard. Zoom does have a whiteboard feature under share screen, but it's pretty rudimentary—like MS Paint.

There's Miro and Mural, which are more like moving objects around, with boxes and arrows for charting. There are a bunch of tools you can Google—many have free trials or free versions.

Let's do one last topic. I've noticed on Twitter everyone is sharing personal productivity tips, often contradictory. Some say get up, shower, eat a full breakfast; others say wear pajamas. It's like the 'wake up at 5 AM and read 700 books' advice. What works for you? What routines make it work for you?

Right now, it's camomile tea and wine. But before that, I tried everything. I'm someone who gets obsessed with all the advice online. What I find most productive is planning my day the day before—a clear, stack-ranked to-do list with time blocked on my calendar. If I do those things, I'm productive. Also, I listen to the same playlist all the time so I'm used to the songs and they're just background noise. I can't listen to new music when working. I've tried many routines but realized I'm most productive when I keep it very simple.

I have no morning routine, which is not advised on Twitter. I get my best heads-down time in the afternoons because I'm on the West Coast and most meetings are during the day. It started out of necessity and now it's how my brain works. You have to notice what energizes you and catch yourself when you're spiraling. I take 'sun breaks'—go outside for five or ten minutes to reset. At the end of the day, I have more structure. I live and die by the clock—I leave work at a set time and do a 'commute' by going for a jog to separate work and home life.

I'm trying to think of a way to answer without self-promotion. For me, I keep all my notes in one place to figure out what's going on. Also, there's all this stuff I can do around the house. When you get to that point of paralysis, writing it down helps you move forward because you've gotten it out of your head. When I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, I just put stuff down. Even if I don't get to it, it's there and I can let go and keep going. The prioritization matrix gets messed up when a five-year-old shows up.

David Allen's brain dump is the key to my sanity. When you're going nuts trying to remember everything, emptying it all out onto paper is so helpful.

We use the exact same model—DACI—and it's helpful.

All right folks, we are right at the top of the hour. Thanks everyone for coming out. Hopefully this was useful. The recording will go up online, and we'll add resources from the chat. We'll expand on these topics. The Zapier team will write more about how we do it, and I'm sure these folks have plans to share their stuff. Most of us have written about how we make remote work work. We weren't able to get to every question, but keep seeking answers. It's an imperfect time—have patience with yourself and your teammates. Happy working from home. Hopefully it's a good experience, or at least one you're willing to keep trying. Thanks everybody.